On Religion

gcarroll5217
May 5
8 min read

The next time you're at the beach, grab a handful and sand and hold it in your palm. How many grains are there? A thousand? Five thousand? Now look around at the sand up and down the beach. How many grains of sand would you estimate? Maybe in the billions or trillions? Certainly more than your mind can grasp.

Now, consider that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on every beach and every desert on the whole planet! To recognize that the size of the universe is really incomprehensible to us is to acknowledge our inability to fathom even modestly large numbers. Like the grains of sand, the scale is impossible for us to grasp.

The understanding - or even knowledge - of the universe outside our solar system did not exist before the 1920s; only 100 years ago. What we've learned in just that short period has changed the way we look at the nature of physics and what we know about our place in the universe.

The same is true in the understanding of our place in time as well as the mechanisms of geology, biology and evolution. All have been revolutionized in the space of one lifetime. The universe is estimated to be approximately 13.8 billion years old. Earth, some 3.5 billion years. Different species and epochs have come and gone. Homo Sapiens has been around for only about 70,000 years and civilizations in only the last few thousand.

How the Universe is Way Bigger Than You Think

** Notes below

What does this have to do with religion? This awareness of our place in space and time has had enormous, though subtle, effects on how we see ourselves, making us more aware of both our size and limitations. We are, in essence, just a tiny terrarium floating in a vast, unimaginable void of space that will ultimately come to an end.

It's from that realization that we can reassess religious beliefs and spirituality that have been the foundations of mythology and religions that were largely based on explaining the origins of the universe and our place in it, as well as providing a basis for morality.

It’s only been in the last five thousand of those years that ‘gods,’ in a structured religious form, have shown up and dominated how the universe is understood and how we conduct ourselves. Much of it; particularly Judeo-Christian western religion, is based on the premise that the earth and humanity are the literal and moral center of creation. One of humanity's greatest flaws - both collectively and as individuals - is a self-centered lack of objectivity. To believe that a God has special concerns for human beings or can respond to appeals strikes me as an arrogant conceit.

As science advanced in the last few hundred years we’ve continually had to redefine what God could be. At one time the primitives believed He/It/They actually lived up in the clouds or in the stars. As science and our understanding of the universe - and our place in it - has grown, religion has increasingly had to redefine a creator as a 'god of the gaps' - as the shrinking number of unknowns are left to 'Him.'

Religious academics and responsible theologians have acknowledged the march of science (how could they not?) and have increasingly retreated from literal interpretations of origin stories to a sort of “revealed truth” that’s still worthy of study and continued moral guidance. While we now know that neither the earth, nor our galaxy, are the center of the universe, many religions still lay claim to a moral authority.

Yet, the realization of our cosmic stature is subliminally seeping into the consciousness of society. Much has been written in recent years about the growing number of Americans who now identify as "nones"; meaning they have no religious connections. A recent survey of the general public found that some 27% is now unaffiliated with any religion - the fastest growing segment of religious trends. Less than 50% belong to a church, synagogue or mosque.

The dropoff is particularly stark among millennials and Gen Z; some 30 points lower than older Americans. Further, children who grow up without organized religion are less likely to become religious as adults, which means these trends will continue to grow.

Even the oldest Americans have seen a slight rise in the percentage of "nones." We're certainly in that camp. Though I was raised Catholic and my wife Episcopal (or Catholic-lite), we both rejected religious dogma. It's also true among our contemporaries. Very few of our friends or family attend church or accept the mythology.

Secularization has become widespread in Europe. But what explains this shift in the American public, and particularly younger generations? There have been multiple theories, including church bias in social or political issues, and the inability of traditional religion and its mythology to respond to current issues.

Increasingly, I believe it is a subtle public understanding about the meaning of these advances in science and humanity's ability to control its environment, genetics and destiny - and especially the realization of our place in the universe and its timeline. That realization has seeped into our collective consciousness enough that the myth of the 'god' in the sky who made man in his image as the center of the universe no longer makes sense - and to many of us seems absurd.

There was a time not long ago when claiming to be an atheist was scandalous. Anyone questioning religious doctrine could be shunned and their conscience racked by guilt. Today, atheism is widely accepted as a legitimate alternate perspective and openly proclaimed by social commentators; including popular comedians who've obviously struck a resonant nerve. George Carlin described in its most naked and ludicrous terms; “So there’s an invisible man up in the sky who’s watching us all the time and judges us all the time. And there are ten things he REALLY doesn’t want us to do. And if we do them he’s going to send us to a fiery, terrible miserable place with pain and suffering for all eternity. But he loves us….” Ricky Gervais, Penn Jillette, Bill Maher and others have also found a receptive audience.

In recent years the logic and clarity in the non-existence of a human-centered creator has only grown. Many of the arguments are well known and popularized by artists like Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Stephen Fry, Brad Pitt and George Clooney, as well as scientists like Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan and more convincingly a slew of philosophers and recent theorists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens

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My own evolution and thinking on this subject has been ongoing. I was a devout Catholic in my youth, but typically began to drop off in adolescence and more decisively in college when introduced to philosophy and more reasoned thought….though it took a while to gradually shed the guilt.

Along the way I became familiar with many of arguments on the non-existence of god(s) and I won't rehash them here. But increasingly freed of my religious indoctrination, I began to note others that reinforced my convictions.

As discussed, the size of universe is one of the more convincing, as it appears to be for so many. With almost infinite worlds, there are likely other galaxies and planets with life. Whatever created the universe had nothing specific to do with humanity on this speck of dust. Whatever created the universe, it is unlikely to have centered on human creation or affairs. We are likely happy byproducts.
Of all the 3,000+ gods across the globe over time, why this Judeo-Christian god, who's only shown up in the last 2-3 thousand years? Most of these religions were verbal traditions passed on by illiterate farmers or herders, in an attempt to explain their origins, structure moral codes and later shaped over the centuries by political necessity. Was it just the fortunate selection by Emperor Constantine - or his mother?
That Judeo-Christian god was only centered on a 200 square mile area in the middle east. It had no relationship or understanding of any culture in Asia, Europe or the New World. If a Creator wanted acknowledgment of his gifts and worship, where has he been over the tens of thousands of years and wouldn't it be made apparent to all humanity in cultures around the globe??
Mentioned above, one of humanity's greatest flaws - both collectively and as individuals - is a self-centered lack of greater perspective. To hold that a supernatural Creator made and has special concerns for human beings is self-obsessed arrogance.

And a byproduct of our peculiar ability to think. If horses could think, God would be a horse. But animals don’t have that ability. They can’t perceive the future. They can’t perceive death. So they don’t have a God and they don’t go to heaven. They just die. And why are we such different “animals?”

Personal Conclusions:

Do I believe there is a God? In the fudgy way so many answer the question; it depends on what that means. Was there something that was, as Aristotle said, a “prime mover?” Is there a spirit or essence that pervades all life in its cycles. Does it embody all the existence and natural forces of the universe - the God of Spinoza? Then I’d say, ‘yes’ there is. Does that mean that that force has any mystical features with any special relevance to man? A consciousness and “concern” about human beings? Something that can be appealed to in prayer to intervene in human affairs? Separate from the grand scheme of the universe, I'd have to say, 'no.'

I hold to the belief that God – in the traditional Christian sense – is a creature of, and necessity of, man’s self-consciousness and ability to envision the future. As Jean Paul Sartre in his book on existentialism put it (God is like the paper cutter – I concoct him in my mind. He/it didn't exist before my ability to create him)

Certainly, a broad interpretation of the Bible as a sort of “revealed truth” that’s worthy of study and providing moral guidance is useful. It’s certainly worth study as a historical document, to understand how and where our mythologies evolved as well as the political, social and moral contexts in which they were written and/or changed.

But candidly; to accept, as so many do, the literal Christian mythology strikes me as a most outrageous jump of logic and common sense. The literal interpretation of the Bible and the Christian mystical superstitions were rejected by Enlightenment figures, including Jefferson, who edited his own Bible to eliminate 'supernatural' references with good reason. They don't stand up to reason. I mean; a man who is the “son of God” comes down to us to “save” us from “sin.” ? To me, and so many others, the proposition seems more ludicrous as the nature of the universe and our existence becomes clearer with each new year and revelation.

**** A related question on the nature of the soul and it/our fate, I've tried to tackle in related post here.

Some additional observations to put our universe in perspective:

While there are a few interloper stars in the photo, nearly every dot in the image is a galaxy. For a sense of scale, if you could hold a grain of sand at arms length up to the sky, that speck is the size of the view. It is one minuscule sliver of our universe, filled with thousands of galaxies, each with billions or trillions of star systems and each of those with its own planets.

Viewing images like these can also provide a profound sense of insignificance — they offer a sense of proportion and understanding of just how small we are on the grand scale.

From <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/opinion/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-awe.html?te=1&nl=the-morning&emc=edit_nn_20220713>

Each speck of light in that image, each swirling swath of color, contains potentially trillions of planets, many of which are like ours.

When we look up, we look for ourselves. Dr. Sagan once said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” and that could not be more true. We long to understand why we’re here and to find meaning in a world where meaning is so often difficult to divine. Telescopes like this remind us that in spite of our specific challenges on Earth, the possibility of connection still exists.